Foxy as a comic epic heroine and A.N. Ostrovsky's stage play Wolves and Sheep (on epic-related drama)

A.N. Ostrovsky's poetic manner in his acute social post-reform comedy Wolves and Sheep (1875) arouses special interest in studying drama epification methods, one of which is hunting concept elaboration. This concept (wolves and sheep) is based on the antithesis of moral and ethical and social representations. The content of this concept goes back to Ostrovsky's comic epic, to the figurative system of folklore and literary genres which focused on folk art. The title of the comedy reflects in a surrogated form a dramatic collision of a one-sided fight with its two variants of development: a wolf chases a sheep and a possible hunting for the wolf that got into the state of a sheep. Both of these variants were embodied in the development of the comedy dramatic conflict and gave the playwright an opportunity to demonstrate the peculiarity of social contradictions and ethical mimicry that accompanies them and serves as a basis for the psychological picture of the characters. 'A poor girl' Glafira has a special role in the comedy. Her image is endued with some peculiar features of a foxy - a trickster in Russian and European folklore and literary traditions. This image is almost not declared (there is only one nomination of a foxy) in the play but has an extremely significant role. The foxy appears in the comedy and broadens the central collision scopes (wolves hunt for sheep), actualizes it in its breadth and varieties of manifestations. The content and development of the image of Glafira, a Foxy, are organically connected with the hunting concept elaboration, they strengthen the ethical contradictions and gives the drama a psychological analysis depth. Glafira's image is fully characterized by peculiarities of her speech portrait and a complex of traditional Foxy's features fixed in European and national folklore and literature. The manner peculiarities of Ostrovsky, who created an artistic image with satirical gags and a deep revelation of female psychology, are observed in the context of a genre chain: Russian folk animal tale - I. A. Krylov's fable classics - J.W. von Goethe's epic poem 'Reynard the Fox' - Ostrovsky's comedy Wolves and Sheep. The key moment of the complex Foxy's nature analysis in the comedy is the study of its mimicry (a vamp, a zaddik and a sinner) and also the heroine's diversity: (cunning, smart, hypocritical yet affectionate, charming and sly, as it is presented in the Russian national tradition). In the golden age of realism in Russian literature, A.N. Ostrovsky enriched the content and the poetics of Russian dramaturgy by referring to the comic epic tradition and creating the Wolves and Sheep comedy where epic-related drama was implemented in the satirical manner of a comedy and a superfine elaboration of a psychological picture.

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